Tuesday, October 22, 2013

After updating the MacBook Air and iMac lines with Intel's latest Haswell processors, Apple today announced that the MacBook Pro with Retina display line of laptops would be getting a major refresh with the latest silicon from Intel. We saw tremendous battery life from the latest MacBook Air when we reviewed it earlier this year, and now Apple's more powerful line of laptops is getting in on the long-life fun. The new Pros will be launching with Apple OS X 10.9 Mavericks, which also promises to offer improved power consumption and extended battery life.

The new 13-inch model is thinner and lighter than before, at 0.71 inches thick and 3.46 pounds. It also has a lower price, starting at just $1,299, though Apple halved the amount of RAM in the base model to 4GB. Apple says that the new model gets 9 hours of battery life and has Wi-Fi that's three times as fast thanks to 802.11ac support.

Apple also updated the 15-inch model with the new Iris Pro integrated graphics and other performance enhancements. It is said to last 8 hours on battery, comes with Thunderbolt 2, and has support for 802.11ac Wi-Fi. It too is getting a price drop, as the 15-inch now starts at $1,999 with a 2.0GHz Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. Though Intel's Iris Pro is surprisingly powerful for integrated graphics, you can also get a Nvidia GeForce GT 750M dedicated chip in the $2,599 configuration, which also comes with a 2.3GHz Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of flash storage.

Both versions are shipping starting today, though it looks like Apple is finally phasing out the non-Retina MacBook Pro models from its lineup — along with their optical disc drives.